France is a hotbed of deployments of low power wide area networks (LPWANs) for smart city applications. Two of the leading would-be standards in unlicensed spectrum, LoRa and Sigfox, hail from the country and have significant roll-out projects. Orange and Bouygues are both implementing LoRa networks to support smart city applications such as lighting and metering, while Orange is also trialling the twin 3GPP standards for licensed bands NB-IoT in LTE, and Enhanced GSM to upgrade legacy 2G services. Now a third operator, Altice (owner of second cellco SFR and Numericable), has opted for Sigfox, which not only has a different technology approach to that of LoRa (based on UltraNarrowBand rather than CDMA), but also a different business model, in…